Sin of Omission
by Baby Morrison
Summary: Internal monologue. Abel/Noelle, Abel/Tres. "I am a liar. A liar, because a sin of omission is still a sin. Perhaps more so."


I could never tell you.

Noelle…

You mean more to me than you ever knew in life; that was not a lie. I never lied about how important you were to me.

Honestly, just being around you was tiring. You perplexed me, confused me, frightened me with how wild and uninhibited you could be.

Any other man would have fallen in love with you in Barcelona, if not long before.

And had I not had all these centuries to contemplate myself, I would have as well, or at least tried. But I couldn't, and I knew that I couldn't.

But for all of my introspective wisdom, I still couldn't tell you the truth.

I dropped hints.

"Anyone would be worried about you, Miss Noelle, not just me."

And still you didn't understand.

Now that you're gone, I find it easier to converse with you – I feel quite certain that we will never meet again. After all, angels do go to heaven, and you are an angel.

I am a liar. A liar, because a sin of omission is still a sin. Perhaps more so.

I let you believe what you liked – that I was merely naïve, nervous, rather than disinterested. That I might truly be in love with you, that, if you persisted, I might…

What did you want me to do? I am a clergyman, I can't be married or have children, and the same decorum applies to you, although one certainly wouldn't have known that seeing your behavior in Barcelona. I realize that I don't always perfectly uphold the regulations of my station either, but there is a rather staggering difference between trivial things that really do effect no one, and something as intimate as the relationship you seemed to want so badly. All that aside, we were AX, assassins, spies, hit-men. How could we have a future together like that?

Your death proves it. AX are not fit to love so intimately.

I wonder if you would have gone so boldly to your death had you not been so eager to impress me. Or if I, too embarrassed to tell you the truth, might have thought clearly enough to save you.

But none of that matters. Long before I joined the ranks of AX, long, even before I entered the clergy…Had you approached me then as you did a few weeks ago, I would still have had no interest in you. I can't deny the man I am.

Kindness certainly is not beyond my reach, nor anyone's in my opinion. Kindness is so much more impersonal than love. I can be kind to anyone, and yet they feel no special attachment to me, nor I to them. There is a peace between comrades that does not exist between lovers, one that clearly says, "I owe you nothing, you owe me nothing. Let's just be good to each other because we can, because we should, because we want to. And at the end of the day, I'll go home and so will you. No guilt, no pain."

Intimacy, love, tenderness – they are all against my nature. When I am not a man of God, I am a predator. Neither of those roles lends me any desire for intimacy whatsoever.

Above all, I am not human.

No human could possibly understand my instincts, my desires, ambitions. Not only that, they would be confused.

How would you react to see me kill, to see me feed?

In the end, emotions are what break the deal every time.

Funnily enough, I have only ever met one person in recent centuries whom I have been even remotely comfortable with.

It's not that he's seen the "real me," because so have you. I don't put on an act unless I have to, but my personality is very dual. By both nature and design, I am more complex than most humans, being mercifully limited in range of personality as they are, believe to be possible.

And that is my downfall; one facet tears at the other until I really don't know who I am – the emotions of others only increase that confusion within myself.

But this one person calms that in me, allows me to contradict myself without being emotionally invested in one facet or another. He merely points out the contradictions as if they were errors in a complicated equation, without any real care for the outcome.

Tres…

But I am lying to him, too.

As I lied to you, I lie to him out of necessity.

He isn't programmed to understand any emotion, and I _do_ have emotion. Although I could never feel it for you, I _do_ feel love – a love that is comfortable in familiarity, unconcerned for emotions where they do not exist, content, even, to be secret.

I love him.

It's laughable, ridiculous, illogical.

But it's true.

I wonder, though…

If I were to tell him, what do you think he might say?

"Does not compute"?

But he lied to me, not the lie of cowardice, but of bravery – defying his comands, something he should be incapable of. He told me that he was out of ammunition, he disobeyed an order to spare both my life and the life of a child.

How does one begin to program that?

How can a moral compass be synthesized?

But, unless I grow much braver very soon, I will continue to lie to him as I lied to you.

And maybe I'll never tell the truth.

Yours most sincerely,

Abel Nightroad


End file.
